What would you do if you weren't afraid?
Mostly Useful ☼ № 18 ☼ Fear ☼ Fortitude ☼ Courage ☼ 1,060 words ☼ 4 minutes
“We will have eternity to celebrate the victories but only a few hours before sunset to win them.”
—Amy Carmichael
Fear is a funny thing. It is often merely a figment of our imagination that obsesses over the worst possible scenarios where the worst possible outcomes always occur. Of course, there are instances where fear is a good thing. However, I think caution is likely a better word. Fear often feels and looks like caution because it relies on many similar internal mechanisms. Fear seems more interested in self-preservation from imagined psychological distress than in protecting us from actual harm. We imagine all the terrible things that might happen so that we avoid experiencing real risk.
Fear is mostly a lie.
Because the mechanisms of fear and caution are so similar, we can assume they share a primary intent: self-preservation. We want to stay alive, so we have warning systems that help keep us that way. This is how fear masquerades as caution. The problem is that the best way to preserve self is inaction. You can’t get hurt if you aren’t doing anything. Think of how it feels when you’re terrified: you’re paralyzed. You can’t make a decision. You don’t know what to do. Fear keeps you stuck in place.
While fear may keep you safe in your current position, life is not static. You are meant to be in motion. You must be moving forward to thrive. How could it be otherwise? While fear may be rightly designed to keep you alive, it is not useful for keeping you full of life. It is not suitable for you to stand still, withdrawing from the world because of what we imagine might be lurking, waiting to harm us.
Fear uses a clever trick to make its lies more attractive: comfort.
For us, comfort means safety. For nearly all of human history, most of your day was concerned with staying alive. If you did not keep moving, literally and figuratively, you increased your likelihood of death. Everything we do, nearly everything we invent, is designed to make life more convenient, efficient, and comfortable. Fear uses comfort to entice us into inaction. Fear whispers, “Why would you leave the safety of this to go into the darkness of the unknown? Shhh, stay here where it’s safe and warm, where there’s food and shelter.”
How can you build anything if you do not venture out? How can you grow if you are not challenged? How can you develop fortitude if you do not weather any storms? How do you know what you are made of until you have only your cleverness to rely on? Indeed, how do you know you are a reliable person unless you have tested yourself and seen what you’re made of? Fear traps you and prevents all that. Over time, your psyche weakens. Safe, comfortable, lethargic, and weak.
The problem with fear is that it imprisons us in an illusion of comfort and safety, saying, “if you stay here, nothing bad will happen.”
The problem with life is that something bad will always happen, even to people hiding from the worst of it.
Humans are strange creatures, though, aren’t we? We can easily have this discussion about fear and agree with the basic premise. Yet, at this very moment, there are things that you and I must do. Fear is keeping us from taking action simply because we’re afraid of what might happen. If you consider how many things you avoid doing something because you are worried, what would you discover? So you must ask this essential question:
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
We all know this truth: when we step out into the unknown, into that which frightens us most, we derive the most significant lessons. Through these sorts of risks, we discover the paradox of the beauty and terror of life. We discover that most things that are worth doing turn out to be utterly terrifying. So the question is a matter of greater danger in proportion to acceptable risk. In other words, what if it is riskier to do nothing? If you have seen the most significant success when you were most afraid, doesn’t that imply that taking risks is precisely what you ought to be doing?
If you find yourself terrified at the reality of what that might mean for you if you were to take action, then you need courage. However, courage is difficult to conjure up on a whim. Indeed, because of our fears, I do not think people are naturally courageous. We tend to put off problematic aspects of life until we absolutely must respond. We prefer the path of least resistance, so we do not focus much on developing courageous character. Because it is not natural, we must learn to be courageous. Courage is not something we can manufacture. It is not available to us on-demand. Living courageously is a choice, but it is not a choice that we can defer until the occasion arises and spurs us into action. Developing courage is a deliberate and consistent practice.
Facing what you are most afraid of builds habits of courage.
Facing your fear and making a choice to act is a wrestling match between yourself and your potential future selves. “Selves,” because there are many paths you might take. You could be the self that chooses the narrow path of facing your fears, strengthening yourself through opposition and risk. Or, you could be the self who walks the wide path without resistance, moving forward but gaining very little.
To discover what you are most afraid of is a process of inquisition. The inquisition begins when we look at the thing we are afraid of and begin to ask the tough, difficult questions:
What is it I am afraid of?
Why am I afraid?
What will happen if my worst fears come true?
What am I risking?
What will I lose?
You can also begin to ask questions that require creative, positive thinking:
What will I lose if I don’t act?
What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?
The wrestling match begins when you insist upon having answers to each of the questions. But first, you must know the answer to this question:
Wayne Dyer said it so well, "What other people think of you is none of your business. It's theirs." When we know that to be true, we can deal with a lot of fears, because, ultimately, most of our fears are based on what we are afraid other people think of us.